Grand Hotel (1932)

Grand Hotel is a 1932 MGM all-star extravaganza melodrama, but this is not like some of those later all-star movies that actually featured fading stars reduced to doing character parts. Here we have major stars who were either at their peak or rising rapidly - Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, John Barrymore, Wallace Beery, Lionel Barrymore.

The setting is the opulent and glamorous Grand Hotel in Berlin. This is Berlin in the age of Weimar Republic decadence. We get the stories of various guests and they’re a wildly assorted bunch.

Grusinskaya (Greta Garbo) is a prima ballerina whose life is falling apart. She feels that her career is in decline. She is right, although that’s largely the result of her own self-doubts, unpredictability and self-destructiveness. She is also no longer sure that her career matters to her. She wants love. She will find love, very unexpectedly.

She finds love in the person of Baron Felix von Geigern (John Barrymore).

The Baron is irresponsible and penniless and he is a jewel thief. He is a rogue, but a loveable rogue. He plans to steal Grusinskaya’s priceless pearl necklace. Instead she steals his heart!

Otto Kringelein (Lionel Barrymore) is a dying businessman who wants to have one last adventure and the Grand Hotel seems like the place to be.

He works for, or did work for, General Director Preysing. Preysing (Wallace Beery) is a vulgar but very rich business tycoon on the verge of ruin. He might be vulgar and ruthless but he is honest. That has been his downfall. Now he has succumbed to the temptation to be less than frank with his business partners. Preysing is in the midst of delicate merger negotiations. He has hired a stenographer. A very pretty young stenographer.

The stenographer is Miss Flaemm (Joan Crawford). Her friends call her Flaemmchen.

It was an inspired decision to cast Garbo and Crawford. They give radically different performances, each actress playing to her own strengths. Garbo gives one of her most extravagant performances. She is beautiful, moody, mysterious, tragic, tortured, neurotic and ten times larger than life. Grusinskaya is not a star. She is a Star. She is a tortured artistic genius. Garbo goes way over the top but she knows what she’s doing. This is melodrama. Garbo understood melodrama. She is beautiful and sexy in a very European way.

Joan Crawford is bold, brassy, sassy and sexy in a very American way. The contrast between two totally different acting approaches works because of the kind of movie this is. The characters are all very different people and they have very different stories. Any kind of story can happen in the Grand Hotel. The stories of some of these people will play out as tragedy, some as melodrama, some as romance, some as farce.

John Barrymore is terrific. He could certainly be a ham but in this movie his performance is restrained, subtle and controlled. In 1932 he was still a huge star and a very handsome man.

You can see why Grusinskaya falls head over heels in love with him. The Baron is a scoundrel but he’s charming, sensitive and romantic and he has a doomed tragic vibe that would excite any woman - Grusinskaya knows that her love can save him. And perhaps it can. Anything is possible in the Grand Hotel. The chemistry between John Barrymore and Garbo is extraordinary.

There is plenty of MGM gloss but it’s totally appropriate. Edmund Goulding as director does a very stylish job which makes the most of some wonderful Art Deco-inspired sets by Cedric Gibbons. And you can’t go wrong with Bill Daniels as your cinematographer.

The most pre-code element in the movie is the relationship between Preysing and Flaemmchen. He wants her to go to England with him, as his secretary. It is very clear that most of her duties will be performed in the bedroom. Flaemmchen understands this, and accepts the offer even though he’s a married man. He gets her a room in the Grand Hotel. We are left in no doubt that he expects her to share a bad with him and that she is willing to do so. There is no suggestion that this makes her a bad woman. A girl has to eat.

The characters have their own stories which gradually intersect.

The most surprising thing about this movie is that while it’s glossy it’s not frothy. It has a slightly dark and cynical edge. And there are no storybook happy endings for any of the main characters. Most survive, but they will be left with emotional scars.

The characters have more depth than you expect, and the script has more substance than you might expect. Garbo, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery and John Barrymore give top-notch performances.

Grand Hotel was a triumph for MGM, cleaning up at the box office and winning the Best Picture Oscar. This is stylish entertainment that has more than mere gloss going for it. Highly recommended.

The Damned Don’t Cry (1950)

The Damned Don’t Cry is a 1950 Joan Crawford melodrama with a definite film noir tinge.

In classic noir style the story is told in flashback. The movie opens with the discovery of the body of a mobster found in the desert. A home movie is discovered that shows the mobster with glamorous socialite Lorna Hansen Forbes (Joan Crawford). Lorna is nowhere to be found which leads the police to speculate that it might be worth questioning her about the murder.

We then get the flashback that fills us in on Lorna’s life. She was once Ethel Whitehead, married to an ordinary working guy, and with a six-year-old son. Life is a constant round of struggle and poverty. When the boy is killed in an accident Ethel has had enough. She leaves. She wants more out of life and she wants to get it before it’s too late.

She gets a job as a fashion model. The models get kickbacks for introducing suckers to a gambling joint. Ethel is starting to make some money and she likes it.

She meets a rather nice man. Martin Blackford (Kent Smith) is an accountant. Through Ethel he meets Grady and Grady has a small accounting problem which Martin clears up. Grady is impressed. Grady is a businessman whose business activities are not what you might call strictly legal. In fact he’s a gangster. Grady is impressed by the idea that a guy like Martin could put his operation on a more sound and profitable footing.

Grady sings Martin’s praises to his boss, big-time mobster George Castleman (David Brian). Castleman sees the possibilities. Castleman represents a new type of gangster. He sees the future in terms of operating a crime organisation like a legitimate business. Much more efficient and much more profitable. In Castleman’s view the days of gang wars and thuggery and having guys rubbed out are over. He offers Martin the job of running the whole financial side of his criminal empire. Martin doesn’t want to be involved in crime but he figures that the only way to keep Ethel is by having lots of money so he takes the job.

Soon Martin is a rich man but he did it all for Ethel but Ethel has set her sights on George Castleman. He can give her what she wants. He can give her more than Martin could ever hope to give her.

Ethel is soon installed as Castleman’s mistress. And with the help of socialite Patricia Longworth (Selena Royle) she reinvents herself as Lorna Hansen Forbes. She has acquired enough class to pass as a high society dame. She has everything she wanted.

For the sake of convenience and simplicity I’m going to continue to refer to her as Ethel.

There’s one fly in the ointment - Nick Prenta (Steve Cochran). Nick runs the west coast territory for Castleman but Nick is old school. He does things the old way. If someone causes a problem Nick gets the boys to take the guy for a ride. Nick’s habit of having guys killed puts him out of synch with Castleman’s approach and there’s eventually going to be a showdown. And Ethel, much against her will, is going to be right in the middle. Ethel doesn’t like being confronted by unpleasant realities like gangsters planning to have each other rubbed out.

It’s a good script with more than enough noirishness to justify the film noir label. Both Ethel and Martin are nice ordinary people but they get sucked in by the lure of easy money and they slowly become corrupted. They make more and more compromises and as they get in deeper it becomes more and more impossible to get out.

Ethel is ambitious and ruthless but she’s not as tough and ruthless as she thinks she is, and while we’re appalled by her climb to the top we can understand her motivation. We can understand why she thinks it’s worth paying any price to escape the life of poverty and despair she once knew. She might be a bad girl but there are lines she will not cross. One of those lines is murder. She will happily live off the proceeds of crime but she wants no part in violence of any kind. She is attracted to George Castleman because he’s a gangster who has renounced violence. It never occurs to Ethel that a situation might arise in which George would be tempted to revert to violence. Ethel thinks she can remain in control of her situation but she’s wrong.

Martin is in the same boat. He thought that being an accountant for the Mob wasn’t the same as being an actual gangster but he learns that once you work for the Mob you’re a gangster whether you like it or not.

Kent Smith is excellent as the hapless Martin. David Brian effortlessly combines smoothness and menace. Steve Cochran is always a joy to watch.

There’s so much to like about this movie but there is one major problem that can’t be evaded. Joan Crawford is right for the part and her performance is excellent but she was simply too old to play this role. At least fifteen years too old. This was true of several of her 1940s movies. Crawford was never one to let that bother her. She always relied on sheer bravado to carry it off and in most cases it worked. It doesn’t work this time.

I can buy the idea that George Castleman falls for her. He’s attracted by her intelligence, her ambition and her ruthlessness. He sees her as a female version of himself. I can just about buy the idea that Martin falls for her. For years he’d worked long hours for very little money. He had neither the time nor the money for a social life and he’s naïve about women.

What I can’t buy is that Nick Prenta would fall for her. He’s not the kind of guy who’s going to fall for a woman almost old enough to be his mother. The whole romance between these two is wildly incongruous and totally unconvincing and unfortunately it’s absolutely critical to the plot that the viewer does buy it.

Apart from that problem this is a fine noir melodrama. If you can ignore the problem of Crawford’s age then it’s highly recommended.

Rain (1932), Blu-Ray review

Lewis Milestone’s tropical melodrama Rain (1932) was based on a play by John Colton and Clemence Randolph, which in turn was based on an excellent short story by W. Somerset Maugham. The story had been filmed in the silent era as Sadie Thompson with Gloria Swanson and Lionel Barrymore. In 1953 would come Miss Sadie Thompson, a disastrously sanitised squeaky-clean version with Rita Hayworth.

It’s the story of a power struggle between a prostitute and a preacher man.

The steamer has just arrived in Pago Pago. The passengers include Dr Macphail and his wife and hellfire-and-brimstone preacher Alfred Davidson (Walter Huston) and his malevolent wife. And also among the passengers is Sadie Thompson (Joan Crawford). Davison and his wife were intending to leave on the following day on a schooner for a voyage to a remote island but a cholera outbreak among the schooner’s crew means they will be stuck in Pago Pago for two weeks. Sadie is leaving as soon as she can, for Apia.

It is raining. The rain is relentless and demoralising.

They are all stuck in the town’s only hotel, which is also the general store, run by the genial Joe Horn (Guy Kibbee).

Davidson and his wife are scandalised by Sadie’s behaviour. She entertains men (Marines from a nearby base) in her room. They listen to music and they dance. Even worse, they laugh. Davidson and his wife know sin when they see it.

Davidson is determined to save Sadie’s soul. If he can’t do that he intends to destroy her. Sin must be rooted out. There is an easy way to destroy her - by persuading the governor to deport her back to the United States. Sadie cannot go back to the States. We assume that she may have had an unfortunate misunderstanding with the authorities there.

At first it seems that Sadie is hopelessly outgunned. Davidson is a fanatic and he has powerful backers so he can force the governor to do his bidding.

This being a pre-code movie we can of course never be sure how the story will end. After 1934 virtue would have to triumph over vice and Sadie would have to suffer some suitable punishment (death being the preferred punishment for immoral women under the Production Code). But in a pre-code move anything can happen.

There are some good supporting performances. Guy Kibbee is as delightful as always. Beulah Bondi as Mrs Davidson gives us a creepy portrait of savage religious bigotry.

But this movie belongs to Joan Crawford and Walter Huston. It’s a joy to watch these two facing off. Both had immense screen presence and charisma. There is some subtlety in the characterisation of Sadie. She has her vulnerable side. She was not the aggressor. She just wanted to be left alone. She just cannot understand the determination of Davidson and his wife to destroy her. But Crawford shows us plenty of Sadie’s fun side as well. She’s a very good-natured bad girl. Crawford’s performance is a times just a bit mannered.

Walter Huston captures the chilling quality of the pious fanatic superbly. Huston was always at his best playing driven obsessive characters with an edge of fanaticism. Mr Davidson has no redeeming qualities. He is incapable of admitting that he could ever be wrong and he is merciless when he decides that someone is a sinner who must be destroyed.

It’s interesting that at no time is Sadie actually described as a prostitute, and we never see her engaging in prostitution. We assume that she has been earning her living for most of her life as a prostitute and it’s clear that every other character in the movie makes the same assumption. But the word is not used. I’m inclined to think that this wasn’t entirely due to timidity of the part of director Lewis Milestone or writer Maxwell Anderson. It’s necessary for the audience to be totally on Sadie’s side and it’s significant that we never actually see her commit a single immoral act. The audience is therefore primed to see Sadie as being a totally innocent victim of Davidson’s persecution.

This is contrast to both the short story and the play in which Sadie is openly plying her trade as a prostitute in Pago Pago. And it gives the movie an added punch. Sadie is being punished by Mr and Mrs Davidson for sins which exist only in their fevered repressed imaginations. And these are sins that are all the more heinous because they’re imaginary.

The theme of the movie is clearly the conflict between those who wish to control other people’s lives and those who want to be free to make their own choices. There are also internal conflicts within Mr and Mrs Davidson. They not only seek to control the lives of others, they are also subjecting themselves to rigid control. They are, if you want to get Freudian, repressed. They are so obsessed by sin that they will not allow any joy into their own lives. They are horrified by sex but it goes beyond that - any kind of fun is something for which they torture themselves with guilt.

There’s a certain inevitability about the ending and it’s an ending that would have been impossible two years later under the Production Code.

There are two crucial scenes in the movie, one of which is the key to Sadie’s character arc, the other being the key to Davidson’s character arc. If a viewer doesn’t buy these scenes then the movie won’t quite work for that person. Both scenes have been criticised for coming out of the blue, without a sufficient groundwork being laid. I don’t entirely accept those criticisms, although perhaps the groundwork needed to be laid a bit more thoroughly. I can’t say any more without giving away spoilers but if you’ve seen the movie you’ll find to which scenes I’m referring. Those two scenes are also crucial when it comes to judging the performances of Crawford and Huston.

Rain is an incredibly interesting movie. Whether you think it’s a great movie depends on the extent to which you enjoy Crawford’s performance (I did enjoy it). It’s one of the must-see pre-code movies. Very highly recommended.

I Saw What You Did (1965)

I Saw What You Did is a 1965 potboiler from the legendary low-budget horror schlockmeister William Castle but it’s a crime thriller rather than an out-and-out horror flick. It belongs to an interesting sub-genre - the telephone thriller.

Libby’s parents are going to be away overnight so she invites her friend Kit over. Libby lives just out of town. Her parents have a kind of hobby farm. It’s a nice place but it’s isolated and Libby gets a bit bored and lonely.

Libby and Kit amuse themselves by making prank phone calls. They pick a number and when someone answers they say, “I saw what you did. I know who you are.” It’s a game that affords them endless entertainment, especially if the person answering has got something to feel guilty about, like playing around with his secretary. But then they ring someone who has done something really wrong and really bad. He’s just committed a murder. And now he thinks there was a witness.

The opening sequences have already established that Libby and Kit are actually nice girls. They’re just young (they’re around fifteen or so) and indulging in harmless girlish pranks. This was 1965 and making prank phone calls was about as wicked as the average fifteen-year-old girl was likely to get (or at least that’s what Hollywood would have had us believe). They’re not girls who would ever intentionally hurt anybody. They could never imagine that anything bad could result from their pranks. Maybe they deserve to be grounded for a week. But now they could be in big trouble. Really big trouble. And they could be about to unwittingly get themselves in much deeper.

Of course they don’t yet know how much trouble they could get into. Being teenage girls they’re kinda boy-crazy but still pretty innocent. Since they picked the number out of the telephone book they really do know where the people they’re calling live and they think it would be tremendous fun to drive by his house to check him out - his voice sounds so sexy! Libby wonders whether she might even be able to find a way to meet him. Kit isn’t sure this is a good idea. But of course it’s all just a game. 

The killer is Steve (John Ireland), he’s just killed his young wife Judith and he’s emotionally entangled with his next-door neighbour Amy (Joan Crawford). He’s on the edge of violence most of the time and he’s the kind of guy who would certainly think nothing of killing an inconvenient witness., Of course there’s no way he could find out where Libby and Kit are, or could he?

To complicate matters the girls are baby-sitting Libby’s kid sister Tess, who has a habit of wandering off at the worst possible moments.

The suspense is pretty effective. William Castle wasn’t a very subtle film-maker but by this time he had plenty of experience in scaring audiences.

The screenplay is by William P. McGivern, a pretty good crime novelist (he wrote The Big Heat), and while it might seem a bit far-fetched it comes across as quite plausible.

Joan Crawford of course gets top billing and she’s in fine form but hers is really more of a supporting part. John Ireland is reasonably solid.  But the real stars are the two girls, Andi Garrett (who plays Libby) and Sara Lane (who plays Kit). The movie stands or falls on their performances and they’re both terrific. Sadly neither went on to have real careers. Libby and Kit are believable. They’re almost grown up, but not quite. They think they’re ready to be treated as adults but they’re still a bit child-like in their inability to think through the consequences of their actions.

This is a William Castle film so it’s actually nowhere near as dark as the subject matter might suggest. He wants to give the audience some thrills and maybe a real scare or two (and he usually managed to do so) but mostly he wants us to have harmless fun. Those were the days when people actually made thrillers (and even horror movies) that were not meant to be harrowing exercises in depravity and degradation and misery. Castle was an old-fashioned showman with a love for gimmicks.

The movie was shot widescreen and in black-and-white and it’s one of those movies that benefits from being in black-and-white.

Universal’s DVD release is barebones but the transfer is very good.

This is good old-fashioned entertainment. You’re not meant to take it too seriously, you’re just meant to sit back and enjoy it. On that basis it works very well.

I Saw What You Did is highly recommended.

Queen Bee (1955)

Queen Bee, released by Columbia in 1955, is an outrageously overheated but wonderfully entertaining melodrama with Joan Crawford delivering one of her most memorable performances.

The Phillips family are southern aristocracy, wealthy mill-owners with immense pride. Avery Phillips (Barry Sullivan) is the nominal head of the family. The actual head of the family is his wife Eva. Eva is no southern belle. She’s a Yankee, a fact that will turn out to be quite important.

Eva’s cousin Jennifer Stewart (Lucy Marlow) is the penniless poor relation who has been invited to stay. Eva’s explanation for this move is that she is lonely. We might be sceptical, but it might be true. Jennifer is a nice girl but hopelessly innocent and naïve. She is overwhelmed by Eva’s apparent kindness, and by her charm and glamour.

Nonetheless it soon becomes evident that all is not well in the Phillips household. Eva’s children have nightmares. Avery’s sister Carol is engaged to be married but is too scared to tell Eva. Avery is drunk most of the time. The man Carol is to marry is Judson Prentiss (John Ireland) and for a man soon to be married he seems irritable and morose.

Jennifer is naïve but she isn’t stupid and slowly she puts the pieces together. Carol had told her that Eva is like a queen bee who stings all her rivals to death and Jennifer begins to realise how true this is. Eva’s manipulations are breathtakingly blatant but they work because she knows what she wants and she will use any methods, any methods at all, to achieve her ends. At the moment her project is to prevent Carol’s marriage. Eva hopes to rekindle an old romance with Jud Prentiss. Whether she really wants Jud or whether she just wants him because Carol wants him is never made clear but given Eva’s personality both possibilities are plausible. And Eva has stolen other women’s men before. She likes doing that. It reassures her that she is irresistible to men. Especially now that the years are creeping up on her.

Of course Eva’s manipulations are going to lead to tragedy. The only question is, will there be any survivors by the time Eva has finished?

It’s an extraordinary performance by Crawford. She goes way over the top but she never loses control. Crawford understood melodrama and she knew exactly how far she could push a performance. She could push it very far indeed.

What’s interesting is that although Eva is one of the screen’s most horrifying monstrous women Crawford does show us the other side to the story. Eva has always felt that as a Yankee she was never going to be accepted, and not being as blue-blooded as the Phillips family made her even more of an outsider. She is a frightened lonely woman. She is terrified by the passing of the years and terrified of losing her power over men because that’s all she has. Crawford does not exactly make her sympathetic but at least we can understand how she became a monster and that makes her more human. And human monsters are more interesting than inhuman ones.

Barry Sullivan and John Ireland are both excellent as the two men who have been Eva’s playthings. They hate the way Eva plays with them but they don’t have the strength of character to do anything about it. They are weak men, but they are perhaps not entirely spineless. We have the feeling that if Eva keeps pushing she might push them into reclaiming their pride and taking a stand. It’s not a certainty, but it’s a possibility. Avery is a hopeless drunk but he has an odd streak of stubbornness.

Ranald MacDougall wrote and directed Queen Bee. As a director he’s no more than competent but as a writer he’s top notch. The script is peppered with deliciously bitchy dialogue and he clearly understands what melodrama is all about.

Queen Bee would make a great double bill with Crawford’s slightly earlier (1950) melodrama Harriet Craig.

The Columbia DVD has no extras worth noting but it offers a fine anamorphic transfer.

Crawford’s venomous performance makes Queen Bee glorious entertainment. Highly recommended.

Harriet Craig (1950)

Joan Crawford made Harriet Craig at Columbia in 1950 at a time when she was really at the top of her game. Crawford’s 1940s output tended to inhabit the borderland between film noir and melodrama with some movies tending more towards one than the other. Harriet Craig is more or less pure melodrama but with some interest for film noir fans.

Walter Craig (Wendell Corey) and his wife Harriet (Crawford) have the perfect marriage. As Harriet explains to her cousin Clare (K.T. Stevens) this is no accident. Harriet works hard to make sure the marriage stays perfect. Any woman who thinks that a happy marriage just happens is a fool. Marriages have to be managed, just like businesses. Naturally that requires one person to do the managing. That person of course is Harriet. As Harriet remarks, “No man's born ready for marriage; he has to be trained.”

Harriet doesn’t just manage her marriage. She does so to an obsessive degree. Everything has its place - furniture, servants, husbands - and it had better stay in its place if it knows what’s good for it. Walter doesn’t mind all this, for the very good reason that he has no idea it is happening.

The problem with Harriet’s style of perfect marriage is that if just one thing deviates from its proper place the whole structure is likely to collapse like a house of cards. That collapse begins in a small way when Harriet is away for a week visiting her sick mother. On her return she discovers that Walter has been engaging in unauthorised activities. He has had friends over for an evening of poker, without first gaining Harriet’s permission (which she would naturally have refused for his own good). Harriet is not pleased and she makes her displeasure known. She does not lose her temper or anything like that. She is not such a fool as that. She knows how to make a husband see he has done the wrong thing, in the smoothest and silkiest way. By now the audience has started to realise that there’s an iron fist hidden beneath the velvet glove but poor Walter still has no idea. 

Harriet is also facing possible rebellion on the part of her cousin Clare. Clare lives in with the Craigs, acting as a sort of general-purpose assistant, secretary and companion to Harriet. Clare is in fact a servant, although she doesn’t know it. Now Clare has fallen in love and is thinking seriously about marriage. This does not suit Harriet at all. Where is she going to find another unpaid servant as useful as Clare? The marriage must of course be stopped.

There are bigger problems in store, when Walter is offered a promotion which will entail spending three months in Japan without Harriet. Harriet does not even want to think about what might happen were Walter to be left unsupervised for three months. This is another potential rebellion that must be nipped in the bud.

Inevitably Harriet’s control starts to slip. Or rather it remains as tight as ever but she is having more and more trouble in exercising her control without those she is controlling becoming uncomfortably aware that they are merely puppets dancing to her tune. If they realise they are being controlled disaster must follow.

This is melodrama, but leavened by a considerable amount of humour. The humour is perhaps of the black comedy variety but it is certainly there. 

Harriet is a monster but there’s some subtlety to Crawford’s performance. Bette Davis could play monsters but they were usually inhuman monsters. Crawford gives us a very human monster. Harriet is still a monster but while we find it difficult to feel sympathy for her Crawford does at least make us understand where she’s coming from. And where she’s coming from is fear. Harriet must maintain her iron grip because she believes the alternative is chaos, the chaos she witnessed in her parents’ marriage. There is no in-between for Harriet. A woman either has total control or she faces chaos, dissolution, oblivion. This gives the movie a touch of tragedy. It also gives Harriet a certain dignity, albeit a monstrous dignity, that prevents the movie from collapsing entirely into high camp excess. There is high camp excess here, but there’s a little more than that. Crawford is in fine form.

Walter might seem superficially to be the innocent victim but he has contributed to the mess in his own way. Fears of the emasculation of American men were rife in this period (see Rebel Without a Cause) and that’s certainly the issue here. Walter has abandoned his masculinity and has voluntarily turned himself into a doormat. In doing so he has not only lost control of his life he has also forfeited any chance of winning Harriet’s respect. Wendell Corey is impressive - an actor who has never received the recognition he deserves.

Crawford wrote some of her own dialogue, including a speech late in the picture which will provide plenty of fuel for those who like to interpret her movies in terms of her own life.

Those who like to view the movies of the past through the distorting lens of 21st century ideologies will find a great deal to enrage them in this movie. The movie certainly comes down on the side of traditional views of marriage and sex roles.

Director Vincent Sherman demonstrates a sure touch with melodrama and manages to avoid excessive staginess (Anne Froelich and James Gunn based their screenplay on George Kelly’s stage play). 

Sony has released this film as part of their Choice Collection. The DVD is barebones with not even a trailer - in fact not even a menu! The transfer is however extremely good.

Harriet Craig is quality melodrama. It’s a must for Crawford fans. Highly recommended

Above Suspicion (1943)

Above Suspicion is a 1943 MGM spy thriller with a hefty dose of romance. The protagonists are not professional spies. Richard Myles (Fred MacMurray) is a slightly bookish American professor at Oxford. His new wife Frances (Joan Crawford) is also American. The fact that they are Americans and are so obviously harmless is precisely the reason they are recruited by British intelligence to carry out a delicate mission in southern Germany in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the war.

They are told it will be a relatively simple mission and not especially dangerous. In fact it proves to be remarkably difficult and extremely dangerous.

The fact that they are amateurs was supposed to be an advantage. As harmless tourists they would be above suspicion. Unfortunately they soon realise that espionage is not really a game for amateurs and to be honest they really have very little idea what they’re doing.

Amateurs they may be, but they are resourceful and rather determined. Of course the reason they are so determined is that they don’t really how dangerous the game of espionage is.

Much of the plot hinges on their amateurishness. They have to make contact with British agents in Germany but they have no idea how such things are done. They have no knowledge of the profession of espionage and of course they make mistakes. They are however brave and determined and their amateur status can sometimes give them an edge, leading the Gestapo to underrate them.

The movie was based on a novel by Helen MacInnes. MacInnes is not well known today but she had a long and successful career as a writer of spy fiction. Her husband worked for MI6 so she had the advantage of inside knowledge of the world of espionage. She was somewhat in the Eric Ambler tradition, preferring protagonists who were ordinary people caught up in espionage rather than professional spies. While Ambler’s heroes were often very reluctant spies MacInnes was more interested in people who were motivated by a sense of decency.

The screenplay has enough twists to keep things interesting. Richard Thorpe was a reliable journeyman director whose approach was straightforward but efficient.

Given the fact that they are playing amateur spies the casting of Fred MacMurray and Joan Crawford works fairly well. They don’t look like spies and they don’t behave like spies, which is of course the whole point of the story. MacMurray has no difficulty playing a mild-mannered professor, and he also has no difficulty in convincing us that underneath his mild exterior he has unexpected reserves of stubbornness and courage. This is a fairly light role for Crawford, playing a very sympathetic and likeable character, and she approaches it with just the right sort of breezy charm and combines this with an underlying strength. Frances Myles is no ditzy airhead, she’s a woman of genuine substance and Crawford gets the balance just right.

The danger of casting Basil Rathbone in a supporting rôle in a movie of this type is that he will proceed to steal the picture. Which he almost succeeds in doing here.

This is generally speaking a fairly lightweight spy thriller although it has a few grim moments to remind us that while espionage can seem like fun it can turn deadly. This is an A-picture with high production values although made in the style of its time, in other words shot on sound stages and the backlot. Despite this it conveys the atmosphere of a world on the brink of war quite effectively. Being an MGM picture it offers more glamour than contemporary spy thriller from other studios, but it’s a movie that aims at excitement in exotic locales rather than grimness.

The Warner Archive made-on-demand DVD offers a very satisfactory transfer, without any extras.

Above Suspicion is well-crafted and benefits from a fine cast. is well-crafted and benefits from a fine cast. It’s not in the same league as movies like Casablanca and Notorious but it’s thoroughly enjoyable and can be unhesitatingly recommended.

Paid (1930)

Paid looks and feels like a Warner Brothers socially conscious hardboiled picture but this 1930 production was actually made by MGM.

Joan Crawford is Mary Turner, and as the movie opens she is about to start a three-year prison sentence for grand larceny. She was accused of stealing from the department store where she worked but she is innocent and department store owner Edward Gilder (Purnell Pratt) knows she’s innocent but doesn’t care. Before she is led from the court she vows to get her revenge.

Three years later she’s out of prison and is introduced to Joe Garson (Robert Armstrong) by her cellmate Agnes Lynch (Marie Prevost). Joe is a crook and he thinks Mary has potential but she springs a surprise on him. In prison she’d studied law and now she has big plans for making money dishonestly but quite legally.



Joe and Agnes are running a blackmailing racket but Mary’s idea is that instead of setting up elderly gentlemen for blackmail as they’d been doing they should set them up for a breach of promise suit. That way they can shake them down for money while still staying technically within the law.

This proves to be a surefire money spinner and Mary soon has other rackets going as well, all of them technically legal. Mary and the other members of Joe’s gang are prospering, much to the disgust of Detective-Sergeant Cassidy (Robert Emmett O’Connor) and his boss, Inspector Burke (John Miljan). Burke is determined to send Mary back to prison but she always seems to stay one step ahead of him, and she knows how to use the law to her advantage. Every time he thinks he’s close to nailing her he gets hit with a restraining order.



Meanwhile Mary hasn’t forgotten the man who sent her to prison. She hits on a particularly devious method of taking her revenge - she romances and marries Gilder’s son Bob (Douglass Montgomery). This turns out to be more complicated than she expected. Bob really is in love with her and she ends up regretting that she’s hurt him. She loves Joe Garson but she’s fond of Bob as well. Then things start to get really complicated for her when Joe is tempted back into real crime and it ends in murder.

The role of Mary Turner is perfectly suited to Joan Crawford’s talents. Mary is a bad girl but she’s not all bad. Life has given her some tough breaks and she never intended to become a criminal, but since that’s the way the cards fell she’s playing her hand as well as she can. She’s ferociously loyal to people who have helped her. She knows Joe is really a liability, being too hot-headed to be a reliable partner, but he helped her out when she needed it and she’s not going to forget that. She’s blinded by her desire for revenge but when she realises how badly she’s hurt Bob she is genuinely remorseful. It’s a complex and demanding role and Crawford gives one of her most powerful performances from this stage of her career.



Marie Prevost is very amusing, and the humour she adds is necessary in a movie that is otherwise rather serious and even bleak for a pre-code film. Robert Armstrong and Douglass Montgomery (billed as Kent Douglass in this his film debut) provide good support as the two men in Mary’s life.

Stylistically this is an unusual MGM film, with director Sam Wood and cinematographer going for a look that would later be more typical of film noir. In fact this movie can be seen as a kind of forerunner of American noir, with a morally ambiguous heroine and with an ambivalent attitude towards its criminal characters. The screenplay by Lucien Hubbard and Charles MacArthur was based on a successful play that had already been filmed twice during the silent era. The script is uncharacteristically hardboiled for an MGM picture, while also managing to be literate and convincing.



Paid has been released as a single-movie made-on-demand DVD in the Warner Archive series. There’s some print damage but mostly both sound and picture quality are reasonably good and certainly more than acceptable.

This is a fine crime melodrama that should appeal to both pre-code fans and film noir fans and will certainly please admirers of Joan Crawford. A movie that deserves to get more attention that it’s received up to date. Highly recommended.

Daisy Kenyon (1947)

Otto Preminger’s Daisy Kenyon is essentially a women’s picture made in a film noir style. Made at Fox in 1947, this is also a superb example of Preminger’s film-making at its best. Daisy Kenyon (Joan Crawford) is a successful New York commercial artist. She is having an affair with a married man, high-flying lawyer Dan O’Mara (Dana Andrews). Dan’s marriage is obviously an unhappy one - his wife Lucille (Ruth Warrick) would have been described in the 1940s as neurotic and she takes out her frustrations on their two daughters. She is also dating a troubled veteran, Peter Lapham (Henry Fonda). All the main characters are damaged in some way. Peter is still getting over the war and the death of his first wife. Dan is aware that he has been a bad husband and father. He longs for a satisfying relationship with a woman but lacks the courage to either rebuild his marriage or make a clean break. Daisy is lonely and longs for love. Lucille is bitter and jealous and resentful. All four characters need to make decisions about their lives. Daisy does make her choice, but then she seems to regret it. She remains torn between the two men, unable to let go of either. The tension builds as all four people start to unravel and there seems to be a real chance that violence or some other tragedy will be the result. Daisy, Dan and Peter are all well-rounded characters with their own strengths and their own flaw. Even Lucille, the most minor and least-developed of the four, is not entirely unsympathetic. Preminger was famous for his “objectivity” - his refusal to manipulate the audience into making judgments on the characters. He wants the audience to weigh up the evidence and then make their own judgment without being told what that judgment should be. Preminger trained as a lawyer and admired the US legal system and wanted his audience to be as impartial as a jury. It’s also an essential part of Preminger’s approach that his films contain very few simple villains. He preferred stories with complex characters who were a mixture of good and bad and he was careful to show both sides of his characters and to give them a fair hearing. He encouraged the actors to look at things from the point of view of the characters they were playing and to understand that the characters had their own reasons even for actions that might appear to others to be destructive. This is very obvious in Daisy Kenyon - this is a very even-handed film. Preminger is, as always, cool and controlled. This is a strange approach to melodrama but it works. This is melodrama played seriously. The characters are all out of control in their own lives which contrasts nicely with the controlled feel of the film. The viewer is never pushed into taking sides. When Preminger made genre films he never made the mistake of despising such films and in this case he treats the women’s melodrama with respect. We are never made to feel that these people’s lives or their problems are trivial. It’s a movie about love, marriage and families and Preminger understands that these are not trivial subjects. Preminger always took the problems of his women characters seriously. There are no token girlfriend characters in a Preminger movie. Crawford was a decade too old to play Daisy but was very keen and convinced Darryl F. Zanuck she could do it. Whether Preminger was happy about this is uncertain but he gets a fine performance from her, managing to tone down her excesses. Crawford is controlled and she’s excellent. Dana Andrews was always good in Preminger’s movies and he’s superb here. Actors have won Oscars for lesser performances. Henry Fonda is the big surprise - he’s terrific. Both Andrews and Fonda underplay their roles, which is exactly the right approach. The performances are unemotional, but the emotions are suggested subtly. Preminger always trusted the American movie audience to have the intelligence not to need to be spoon-fed and Andrews and Fonda (and Crawford to a great extent as well) give him the sorts of nuanced performances that he valued. Ruth Warrick on the other hand is all barely suppressed hysteria, but again the fact that she’s trying to keep a lid on the cauldron of her emotions adds to the emotional depth of the film. Suppressed emotions are always more disturbing than overt emotionalism. The DVD is typical of Fox’s film noir releases - a glorious print and packed with high-quality extras. Foster Hirsch’s commentary track is well worth the listen and there are two documentaries, one on the movie itself and one on Preminger’s career at 20th Century-Fox. This is what all DVD releases would be like if we lived in an ideal world and Fox are to be congratulated for treating a fine film with the respect it deserves. The DVD era has seen Preminger’s reputation not merely rehabilitated but growing by leaps and bounds. This is only just. This is a superbly crafted movie by a master film-maker. One of the best of all the hybrid women’s noirs of the 40s, and one of Joan Crawford’s best pictures.

Dancing Lady (1933)

MGM’s 1933 musical Dancing Lady can be seen as an attempt by the studio to do something in the style of Warner Brothers’ 1932 hit 42nd Street. MGM couldn’t capture the hardboiled atmosphere that made 42nd Street so distinctive and they didn’t have Busby Berkeley but they did have plenty of money and they did have two great stars in Joan Crawford and Clark Gable. The result is lightweight but a lot of fun.

Its main claim to fame though is probably that it launched the film career of Fred Astaire. It’s an often overlooked fact that Fred Astaire’s first dancing partner in the movies was not Ginger Rogers but was in fact Joan Crawford.



Even back in 1933 the plot was already hackneyed. Burlesque artiste Janie Barlow (Joan Crawford) will do just about anything to get her break as a dancer. Her opportunity comes when she meets rich dissolute playboy Tod Newton (Franchot Tone). He pulls strings to get her an audition with renowned Broadway producer Patch Gallagher (Clark Gable). Gallagher is tired of having wealthy backers trying to get their girlfriends into his show and tells his assistant to give her the brush-off but the assistant finally persuades him to take a look at her. He can see at once that she has potential, so now she’s got a job in the chorus line.

Tod isn’t really interested in furthering her theatrical career. He’s more interested in getting her into the bedroom than onto the stage, but she’s so single-minded about dancing that he figures that getting her into the chorus line will keep her interested and then when she realises how tough Broadway is she’ll be more inclined to accept her attentions. At last that’s his initial plan, but he soon realises that actually he wants to marry her.



While Janie is kept busy fending off Tod’s attentions Patch has had second thoughts about his new find. He’s decided that she really is something social, that she just might have what it takes to become a star, and that he should take a big chance and put her into the lead role. She’ll be dancing opposite a well-established Broadway star named Fred Astaire. Naturally things aren’t going to work out that smoothly or that simply, the show faces cancellation and Janie faces the even more unpleasant fate of marriage to Tod, that being the only alternative she’s left with.

Of course it can’t end that way and somehow Patch will find a way to save the show, and Janie will get her chance.



The unoriginality of the plot doesn’t matter in the least in a movie like this. What does matter is the charisma of the leads and the quality of the musical numbers. In both those respects Dancing Lady is on firm ground. They may not have had Busby Berkeley but the music is good and the production numbers are spectacular. At times surreal and even verging on the bizarre, but impressive nonetheless.

Crawford and Gable are both terrific and as always they have tremendous chemistry. As a dancer Crawford might not have been Ginger Rogers but she was still a pretty good hoofer. Her dance duets with Astaire are not as elaborate as the ones he would later do with Rogers but Crawford acquits herself extremely well.



There’s a strong and rather varied supporting cast. Franchot Tone is reasonably good as the smooth but somewhat sleazy Tod. Astaire only appears in the dance routines. Robert Benchley is amusing as a slightly scatter-brained gossip columnist. There’s also the first movie appearance of Nelson Eddy. Plus there’s comic relief courtesy of the Three Stooges, a very strange touch that works better than you’d expect.

Robert Z. Leonard is one of those often overlooked directors. He was no auteur but he was a capable craftsman who could handle just about any genre, the kind of director who was the backbone of Hollywood in the days of the studio system. He does his usual competent job here.



There’s not a huge amount of pre-code sex and sin here, but there is some. Janie does after all start her career as a strip-tease artiste, and there are a few risque moments scattered through the film.

This is not perhaps one of the great musicals of the 30s but it’s thoroughly enjoyable and it features Gable and Crawford at their most charming and likeable. Definitely recommended.